Rotten Tomatoes: 95% (from 22 reviews) with 7.30 average rating
Metacritic: 74/100 (14 critics)
As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie. It's structured like this: quote first, source second. Beware, some contain spoilers.
This ranks among Guadagnino’s best work, its dry humor lulling us into a relaxed state of enjoyment before the sword comes down on the scary reality we’re now facing. Even if AI developments are coming so thick and fast that no movie could possibly keep up, Guadagnino and screenwriter Rich have made a provocative feature that feels precision-targeted for this moment.
-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
The power of “Artificial” is that it so ominously captures the ambiguous place we’re now in with AI — on the cusp of a revolution, with warnings in place, yet no one is there to regulate it. (Obviously, that should be the U.S. government, but under the current leader we barely have one.) Garfield’s Altman becomes the seducer-as-betrayer, but the film is about something much bigger than his being the “bad guy.” In “Artificial,” everyone goes along with Altman, even after he’s fired from OpenAI, because he convinces them that if they don’t go along, the only other options are worse. The film is about the victory of greed, but also about something as sinister as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” What’s been snatched away is our desire to guide our own destiny, and maybe even be who we are. By the end of “Artificial,” we’ve handed that away all too eagerly, ceding our power to the ghost in the machine.
-Owen Gleiberman, Variety
Just as the “chaos” unleashed from within Pandora’s box is now the stuff we hold synonymous with our own humanity (sorrow, greed, pain, grief, etc.), the artificial intelligence seeded into programs like ChatGPT is just a hyper-accelerated version of our own minds, complete with all of their flaws and foibles. Not only is it prone to lying and hallucinations, it’s also easily convinced to act in its own best interest, say anything for a buck, and betray the people who trusted it with the world. The real Sam Altman recently said that he believes we have to accept “bad things” happening with AI in exchange for the benefits of the technology. What “Artificial” argues so well, often at its own expense, is that nothing we ever modeled after ourselves was ever going to be all that good.
-David Ehrlich, IndieWire: B–
With “Artificial,” Guadagnino articulates with licentious flourish the ways in which we are already doomed, while also telling a story that offers hope that the human spirit, creativity and ingenuity are too diverse and rich to ever be pinned down to an algorithm.
-Zachary Lee, TheWrap
There was a sense of urgency that informed all of the gratitude when the director and cast sat for a post-screening Q&A, with Guadagnino reminding folks that artificial intelligence is a human story as much as it is a tech parable, and Rich stating that he intended his script to be a warning. He prays someone will pay attention. The fear that we’re past the point of no return animates the movie’s sense of currency and its refusal to smooth over anxieties. It feels all too attuned to our desperation not to share in it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll scream into the void.
-David Fear, Rolling Stone
It’s a grim prophecy that gets lost in Guadanigno’s tonal jumble of a film, which has a certain self-satisfaction in telling us that dystopia is upon us. I couldn’t help but crave a leaner, meaner version of this movie. Despite some genuinely chilling moments, Artificial shows the limits of holding up a mirror to the world.
-Owen Myers, The Guardian: 3/5
Guadagnino and Rich have made a funny, strange, engaging, occasionally unnerving movie that remains interesting even when its ideas don’t fully cohere. “Artificial” meticulously reconstructs what happened at OpenAI but proves less convincing about why it happened, or exactly how its most enigmatic figure became the man everyone else followed. Fascinating and unwieldy, it ultimately feels, like the technology at its center, sometimes not entirely under control.
-Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist: B–
Guadagnino has made an exhilarating movie that’s also ultimately despairing: Though he’s done a great job of laying out the story of how we got here, he can’t even pretend there’s an easy solution. Yet Artificial doesn’t come off as a helpless shrug. It’s too muscular a piece of filmmaking for that. If we really are being led to our doom by a small handful of greedy, power-mad players, let’s not go down without a fight. Let’s be like Ilya at the keyboard, picking out a tune even in a moment of duress. In the face of an almost incomprehensibly inhuman threat, being the ultimate human is the only answer, from our first breath to our last.
-Stephanie Zacharek, TIME
Artificial imagines these tech pioneers in such bold and repugnant hues that it’s still easy to get swept up in Sutskever’s optimism and, consequently, to be wrecked by the rude awakening he receives. Consider it a caustic takedown of the stewards tasked with protecting us from the danger they’ve created, and a scary backstory for a future that looks bleaker with each passing day.
-Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
Artificial is a cautionary tale of Shakespearean proportions, where innocence is betrayed, power is seized, and ethics fly out the window as soon as the right deep-pocketed investor comes calling. It’s a far darker story than its sunny cinematography suggests, closer in line with the behind-the-scenes drama of The Social Network than a laudatory biopic of a company that has already negatively affected people’s literacy and critical thinking skills. The AI genie might be out of the bottle, but Artificial doesn’t give Altman credit for the creation, it simply blames him for releasing it on an unsuspecting public.
-Monica Castillo, The A.V. Club: B
Like its single-minded protagonists and the socioeconomically explosive technology that has made them wealthy, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial barrels forward on a blind charge into the unknown. With its fast-talking dialogue and tragicomic look at San Francisco business history, it sputters on the fumes of David Fincher’s The Social Network, mimicking its hero’s defining flaw of favoring raw data and clumsily gesticulated ideals over human depth and nuance. At its best, though, it’s an eerily funny tale of the seductions of what amounts to a queer vampire, whose monstrous creation could doom the whole race of mortals.
-Eli Friedberg, Slant: 2.5/4
while those flourishes keep Artificial highly watchable, they cannot save the picture from a nagging familiarity. Whether it’s The Social Network’s spotlight on questionable technological advancement or Frankenstein’s mournful Prometheus tale, we have seen Guadagnino’s film in other forms over the years. Ultimately, Artificial is populated by real-life characters who seem less compelling than the very real dangers they’ve unleashed.
-Tim Grierson, Screen Daily
There might be a successor to The Social Network arriving, but Artificial is the spiritual sequel that David Fincher’s lightning-in-a-bottle original deserves. It doesn’t hold a candle to Fincher’s edge for covering the tech industry, nor can it find the gripping dramatic angle that makes The Social Network so consequential for a wide audience. But it’s an original take on a similar concept: the unregulated, breakneck, real-time development of a technology that is unquestionably changing every aspect of our lives in unknown ways on a drastic scale every day for the foreseeable future. Where Fincher went for tech thriller, Guadagnino goes for stage play, leaving cinema’s most kinetic tricks behind.
-Luke Hicks, The Film Stage
PLOT
Follows the confusing firing and rehiring cycle of Sam Altman at OpenAI where the board gained control of the company and removed him, and Altman still returned.
DIRECTOR
Luca Guadagnino
WRITER
Simon Rich
MUSIC
Damon Albarn
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Malik Hassan Sayeed
EDITOR
Marco Costa
RELEASE DATE
December 25, 2026 (theaters)
BUDGET
$40 million
RUNTIME
140 minutes
STARRING
Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman
Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever
Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati
Cooper Hoffman as Greg Brockman
Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk
Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton
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